what inspired you to start your own business essay

what inspired you to start your own business essay

Exploring the Motivations Behind Starting a Business: An In-Depth Analysis

1. Introduction to Entrepreneurship and Business Ownership

It is generally accepted that entrepreneurship stimulates economic development, and that small business formation is seen as critical to the health of an economy, due to the numbers of jobs created and their contribution to overall productivity. While this is the dominant view at the macro-business economic level, much research has focused at the level of the individual entrepreneur- why people might start and, more interestingly, grow businesses. Crick and Crick note that preventative reasons for business start-ups, which predicated the bulk of earlier studies, have been replaced by entrepreneurialism and venture capital. The notion of going it alone, lateral competencies, personal enterprise, and indeed individual esteem, can cloud the main issue; that it is the start-up activity itself that is frequently the subject of research attention.

The purpose of this study was to explore the reasons why people start businesses in order to highlight fundamental differences in their motivations. A comparative analysis of businesses initiated by individuals who considered business ownership their predominant career choice, versus those who simply thought it a good investment opportunity, was undertaken to make distinctions on this basis. The question of whether these differences in pre-startup desirability affected the post-start up attitudes of the organizations in the long term was also addressed. Numerous exploratory or descriptive research studies have been undertaken which attempt to isolate the underlying factors responsible for business startups. However, it may be too simple to lump such a diverse range of underlying phenomena as a ‘startup’ when they actually represent several different ‘types’ of phenomenon.

2. Personal Motivations for Starting a Business

One key motivator for starting a business is experiencing or witnessing job dissatisfaction. Sometimes, the opportunity to start a business arises from an apparent lack of professional growth or advancement. Since the entrepreneurs see no future where they are, they seek other professional opportunities elsewhere, including business formation. Entrepreneurs dissatisfied with their past jobs sometimes prefer self-employment because they believe they can achieve a higher degree of job satisfaction or job fit outside of their past company environment. This dissatisfaction with their past employed status provides a strong push for these individuals to start and run their own businesses. Furthermore, for those individuals who never experienced previous dissatisfaction, they may have seen friends or family start successful businesses and enjoy the benefits of business ownership. These observers of business entrepreneurship may have been inspired by the successes of those business owners to seek similar personal satisfaction later in life.

While the professional and financial motivations for starting small firms can be quite compelling, the personal and lifestyle motivations are often seen as the most significant benefits of owning a small business. In fact, many of those who operate small businesses do so not simply to make money, but because they want to be in control of their own lives. These individuals may be responding to a perceived lack of meaningful alternatives. They often see working for themselves as the only way to achieve the career flexibility, job challenge, creativity, and freedom that they desire. The lifestyle of the business owner is quite different from the lifestyle of those that are employed by others. Small business owners typically work much longer hours than employees of larger firms. They must also balance work and family life more carefully. Although self-employment does not always result in greater happiness or life satisfaction, many small business owners do feel that their businesses enhance their overall quality of life.

3. Economic and Market Factors Influencing Entrepreneurship

In the search for these factors, Schramm describes the economic boss, the market opportunist, the lottery player, and the career entrepreneur. Knight differentiates between push versus pull entrepreneurs, with the primary differentiator between the two poles being poverty or affluence. The potential entrepreneurs that he interviews in Dar Es Saalam, Tanzania, have verbalized a combination of push and pull motives. The push motivation is a result of joblessness, low incomes, or unsuitable work threats, while the pull motivation is tied to the perceived employment opportunity as a driving force to start a business.

Applying a larger lens beyond community-specific issues, researchers often take a market-level approach to explore the reasons behind why people choose to become entrepreneurs. The studies have found that contextual conditions such as demand, supply, and policy matter when it comes to producing a greater number of entrepreneurs. In other words, for people to create jobs and start a business, a combination of different types of resources must be available across multiple system levels. Iijima has suggested that the role of entrepreneurs in creating jobs will be enhanced through increases in the production of new businesses and that we should begin thinking about promoting and accelerating entrepreneurship through these market manipulations, especially given that job creation from the expansion of existing businesses has been diminishing.

4. Challenges and Opportunities in Starting a Business

Challenges are assumed integral to starting a small business, but why? This is not to say that owners of small businesses should believe that they can trade their hard work for untold wealth. Indeed, founded on an entrepreneurial spirit of inventiveness, innovation, and perseverance, individualism represents the primary attractor to this endeavor. This is the “so-called” internal pull: the reason individuals create. Opening a bookstore in a resort town because they love books, or developing energy-efficient appliances because they are interested in conserving the environment. These represent the draws, attracting individuals into the small business arena. The internal pulls can be broadly segmented into four major constructs. High autonomy also exerts the greatest influence over the entrepreneur’s motivation. Individuals start their own businesses because they seek greater autonomy or personal satisfaction than what was otherwise possible from other employment. At the core of this autonomy, digested as freedom to exercise control over personal and professional life activities, lies the ability to set out their own agendas, priorities, and long-term goals.

Today, corporations, despite their size or market share, are realizing the need to innovate and invest in R&D, and do so constantly. They are essentially operating on the same plane as the small business; the latter’s priorities to eat and invent are not as different as some would want to think. Complex and broad product lines that require high levels of R&D are not solely the domain of larger firms. In fact, the concept of mass-customization is giving the small business a real potential lead. Given these observations, it becomes critical to understand why entrepreneurs create businesses. Non-specificity is unwarranted, unproductive and, indeed, unrealistic. Creating a small home-based business appears to be as much about “control,” as it is about “wealth.” Entrepreneurship requires something beyond sheer survival as its motivation.

5. Conclusion: Understanding the Complexities of Entrepreneurial Ventures

Increasing the list of accepted creation motives or acknowledging that there are many types of entrepreneurs pursuing many different and valid business creation goals will not force the most significant explanatory model into irrelevance. The present study found that a large portion of entrepreneurs had looked at and hold an interest in working with a relatively narrow group of productive opportunities while many people continue to pursue careers more focused on strictly financial returns, even holding entrepreneurial characteristics, and do not look at wealth creation motives to the same extent. Early career personal motives, the competitive nature of the marketplace, and the institutional support framework contribute to the prerequisites for significant business creation efforts independent of the exact perceived potential of any specific opportunity.

To present a summary set of explanations as to why individuals embark on the challenge of starting and managing a new business leads to a complete theoretical and policy understanding of start-up activity. One important theme to emerge was that individuals often are involved with productive opportunities and with the creation of change long before the creation of the firm. This complicates the measurement efforts. Productive capabilities are often perceived only after behavior has been witnessed. This complicates the establishment of proactive, risk-taking ties. Often, the element of chance is mentioned in descriptions of business creation opportunities.